How fire, climate and people shaped Africa’s landscapes

The University of Reading is part of a new €12 million research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under its Horizon Europe Synergy Grant scheme.

The project, Ecological Archaeologies of the Afrotropics (EcoARCH), will investigate how human activities, climate, and wildfire have shaped landscapes and biodiversity across Africa and Arabia over the past 6,000 years.

Led by Professor David Wright at the University of Oslo, EcoARCH brings together experts in archaeology, geosciences, evolutionary ecology, and land-cover modelling from three institutions: the University of Oslo, Penn State University and the University of Reading. The six-year project begins in March 2026.

Professor Sandy Harrison from the University of Reading said: “I’m really excited that the EcoARCH project has been awarded a SYNERGY grant.

“The project brings together many different approaches to understand human-climate interactions during the Holocene in Africa, from field sampling of a wide range of environmental indicators including ancient DNA across a range of different sites, to the use of AI analysis techniques to generate pollen data rapidly, and data analysis and modelling to understand what’s going on at local, regional and continental scales.

“One great feature is that we will be working alongside a number of African colleagues who will bring their local expertise in archaeology and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction to the project.”

The Africa tropics region today is home to nearly one billion people and faces some of the most severe impacts of global climate change. Yet scientists currently lack detailed, observationally constrained data on how past environmental changes occurred and what drove them.

EcoARCH aims to fill this gap by generating high-resolution reconstructions of land cover and climate, which will improve the accuracy of computer simulations used to predict future climate scenarios.

Researchers will combine scientific techniques, including ancient DNA analysis, rapid pollen data generation using AI, and advanced vegetation and fire modelling. Fieldwork will focus on five geographically diverse sites across Africa and Arabia, supported by a regional consortium of scientists committed to harmonised palaeoecological data collection.